As a software developer well into my second decade of professional experience, I maintain a small number of technologies at what you might call an expert level. These technologies shift in and out of focus depending on what my current projects are.

When I complete a project and don't use the technology for more than a year or so, I've found that I forget all of the nitty gritty stuff and remember all the big conceptual stuff.

For example, I recently returned to Java after several years of disuse. All the bit conceptual stuff that was really hard for me to pick up initially, like polymorphic behavior, multithreading, etc., was still there. The easy but nit-picky stuff was all gone. I'd forgotten when boxing happens and doesn't happen, the behavior of equals in reference vs value types, even where I'm supposed to put certain syntactic elements. Simple questions on StackOverflow to the rescue!

As another example, I did a large project involving SVG in the early 2000's and got to the point where I knew as much as there was to know about it. I recently did a quick one-off project that utilized SVG, and I found that I'd retained the big conceptual ideas, such as the behavior of the coordinate system, the hierarchy of shapes, viewports, groups, etc., but I'd totally forgotten a huge laundry list of practical nitty-gritty things about actually making an SVG experience work.

In the Java example I was embarking on a large project, so I hit the books and re-taught myself to fish again, because it was quite worth my time investment to start from the fundamentals and work my way back up. In the SVG example, I literally just wanted to do something in an afternoon, and I knew SVG could do it, and I wasn't going to do any SVG work after that. Hitting the books and teaching myself to fish in that scenario would have been a waste of time. So I plowed through and was helped immensely by the simple-question simple-answer Stack Overflow scenario.

Then there's a whole list of technologies that I really don't have the brain-space to keep abreast of, but I still need to use. For example I am not an expert at shell scripting, but on occasion I need to write one. Back to Stack Overflow and the simple answers to simple questions.

Before Stack Overflow I wouldn't have been in the dark--as a long-time Internet community member, I would have gone through the usual: find the right community with the most helpful people, hope the community has a search engine or is well indexed by Google, read through long lists of replies without a voting system or assessment of quality, rinse-repeat. Stack Overflow speeds that process up immensely.

I've noticed a pattern in my attitude towards SO: when I ready an article about it on Hacker News, I get mad. When I'm actually on it, I get detailed, multiple answers to my question, written before I ever got there.

My suspicion is that many people noticed that a high rank on Stack Overflow was one way to generate a reputation that might get you freelance work, and then discovered that too many other people were trying to do the same thing, so it became competitive and trollish...for them. But all I want to do is find an answer to my question, that is more clear (and with better examples) than the one in the software's actual documentation (which reads like it was written for a textbook or maybe an AI, rather than the kind of answer you actually get from asking somebody for help).

SO still works, better than ever, for finding out the answer to your question. It just doesn't work as a social network or an interview/job board/advertising site. But, you know, I don't think that's a problem for me, and really, there are other websites out there for that.

Just look for the answer to your question, it's probably there, and if it isn't then it likely is not available anywhere else on the internet either, including the software documentation. Used this way, the SO internal politics is a non-issue.

I tried contributing but it seems like everything is answered now except for the most corner-case things. I feel bad for people asking questions because they almost all get downvoted.

There was a time when it was useful but I agree with what another poster said: it's stuck in time and it shows.

I think this is actually not a problem, because most users can still successfully find the answers they need on Stack Overflow.

Here's how I believe I and other users use Stack Overflow. We have a problem. We Google that problem (or occasionally search on Stack Overflow). We usually find a fairly popular (and high-quality) question with a fairly popular answer. We're satisfied by that answer.

The article points out that the number of good questions has remained constant, but the number of bad questions has increased. Maybe there's really a close-to-constant number of good, searchable questions that can be asked at any given time, and the declining average quality is just a result of Stack Overflow's popularity.

The picture was much different when I started out, and I feel like StackOverflow is still an invaluable resource for juniors/mid-levels or for those transitioning to an unfamiliar technology.

Then, somehow it got boring and complicated, and I stopped playing. I don't exactly remember what or how that happened, but it was a mixture of new rules and confusing features.

I haven't played there for more than 2 years, but I'm still in the top 2%, and best of all, I still get points from all my previous contributions. When I stopped, I had around 8k points; now I have 19k points.

StackOverflow was way more fun (and useful) at the beginning.

I think a major factor is that simply, all the basic and interesting questions already got asked. New questions these days tend to be very specific and complicated.

Here is the workflow:

1. Google 'question string'

2. Click first stack overflow link

3. Skip to the first answer without reading the question.

This, incredibly, works for about 80% of the things I need to look up day to day. I often find that I either need a simple example, or just need my memory jogged. In my opinion the entire internet is better because of the existence of this one site.

I agree with all of the author's points, but I think stack overflow is worthwhile despite these problems. And trust me, I've gotten my own snarky, low effort, infuriating, heavily upvoted, answers from Jon Skeet.

Stack Overflow became and is the best place to get answers to programming problems because of the community it has been able to build. There are always competent people ready to provide an answer and they do it quickly. However, the problem is that the community is difficult to participate in. You need rep to do anything and you don't get rep until you do something. You also need to compete with a lot of other people in order to contribute usefully, which makes the barrier even higher. Ultimately, this undermines the community, which is what makes Stack Overflow good.

You can say that these effects can be ignored because answers are still given and you'd be right. But the difficulties do exist. I have enough rep on SO now to do most things (maybe not down-voting), but it was hard to get, so I can attest to what the OP was saying. I can only imagine it's harder now after the community has grown and rep inflation has kicked in.

I've never tried to participate in Stack Overflow as a hyper-active question answerer, but as a sometimes-user of the site who ends up there via Google often when performing coding question searches, the site still suffers from what has been dubbed "The Fastest Gun in the West" problem. I can usually find answers that are at least a useful starting point to solving my core problem on Stack Overflow but they are very often not the top ranked answer and are often way at the bottom sitting with a 0 rating due to having been posted "long" after the question went live (and by "long" after I usually mean like the next day). The top rated stuff is often superficial junk answers that just happened to be the best available when the question was still a hot one.

So I'd argue that even from a non-poster's view, the site is broken (because I have to dig through it more than I should have to) though still ultimately useful.

These days I'm skipping Stack Overflow entirely and jumping straight to the docs, unless it's a common question that I can never remember properly (like some esoteric git-fu command).

The answers on SO are outdated or crappy. When you can't ask questions about an evolving framework without it getting marked as duplicate, then the answers quickly lose all value. And the people that were answering because they wanted to give back (not because they want to farm karma) are leaving.

From my viewpoint, the main problem is the drive for "karma". You may visit an interesting question and you will often find that partial solutions (or solutions to a re-phrasing of the question [thats as kindly as I can put it])have a high score while the true and, more importantly complete, answer (probably written a few days after the original question was posed) has zero points.

There are also those who answer a factual question with an opinion - I am sure that Dante would have added another level in hell for just that sin should he have lived in the modern age.

Points are not everything but there is a tendency for the scoring system to mislead the seeker after a solution unless they are aware that all factual answers have value.

1. People don't search properly before posting

2. There are a lot of "low quality" questions that could be answered by reading documentation (also see 1)

3. Most of the questions that apply to 1 & 2 have already been answered on StackOverflow.

4. It's overwhelmingly (US) English, so people who are not fluent pendants are down-voted.

5. The people who need the most help are those who are least suited to post, as they rarely give enough detail ([example][1] - where to start?), ask very generic questions ([how to build a website][2]), or ask questions that have been answered before

When StackOverflow started, I spent a great deal of time on it as it felt like a good way to help and share knowledge (or just show off). Nowadays, I'll vote when I find an answer (usually via Duck Duck Go), but [the last question I asked][3] is still unanswered (allowing Facebook to use this as a support forum is a joke).

I feel that it's become a victim of its own success, and is getting to the point where it's as bad as the sites it tried to replace.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9395670/dataset-getting-m...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/87305/how-to-build-a-webs...

[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8077747/what-are-facebook...

I was well rewarded with internet points which was somewhat appealing at the time. But that got old pretty quickly. What got old even faster was how cold and unkind other users could be.

Over time I noticed I would always be second or later in answering questions; people would hurriedly toss up something hoping for that green check mark, and their answers would be pretty mediocre in most cases. However, speed was key and my answers would end up passed over.

I continued doing it for a while because I enjoyed the exercise of it, but watching the overall quality of the site decline so rapidly absolutely killed it for me.

I lasted around 2 years in total, maybe 6 months of that spent as a very active user.

These days I actually filter it from my search results, like medium, many git repository mirrors, and content-farmy sites which hit on all major popular topics with the thinnest and least professional content possible.

There are a LOT of answers that have huge numbers of upvotes that are simply wrong--mostly because things change and evolve.

SO is good for something which just came out in the last 6 months--anything older than 3 years needs to be treated with extreme skepticism.

The few times I have seen SO recently have been from friends trying to do Linux things, looking for answers on SO, and finding some ludicrous answer that is either just wrong or an extremely roundabout (and overcomplicated) approach to solving it.

I know it's currently in vogue to hate on it, but for me it continues to be a great source of information.